Emilio de' Cavalieri "Gentiluomo Romano": His Life and Letters, His Role as Superintendent of all the Arts at the Medici Court, and His Musical Compositions. With Addenda to L'aria di Fiorenza and The Court Musicians in Florence (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Emilio de’ Cavalieri “Gentiluomo Romano.” His Life and Letters, His Role as Superintendent of all the Arts at the Medici Court, and His Musical Compositions. With Addenda to L’aria di Fiorenza and The Court Musicians in Florence Murray C. Bradshaw Emilio de’ Cavalieri “Gentiluomo Romano.” His Life and Letters, His Role as Superintendent of all the Arts at the Medici Court, and His Musical Compositions. With Addenda to L’aria di Fiorenza and The Court Musicians in Florence. By Warren Kirkendale . ( Historiae Musicae Cultores, 86.) Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2001. [ 551 p. ISBN 88-222-4949-0. €77.] Plates, bibliography, discography, indexes. Warren Kirkendale's study of the "Roman gentleman," Emilio de' Cavalieri (ca. 1550- 1602) is a careful analysis of the life and works of this important composer. It is also a clear investigation into the immense changes taking place in Western music, art, and aesthetics around 1600, and the role that Cavalieri played in bringing them about. This volume concludes a trilogy that began with L'aria di Fiorenza (1972) and The Court Musicians in FlorenceDuring the Principate of the Medicis (1993). Letters and documents, many being addenda to these earlier books, along with an extensive bibliography, discography, and indexes (persons, subjects, etc.), account for over half of its 551 pages. It is a work of thorough scholarship, bringing to fruition Kirkendale's lifelong devotion to Cavalieri, and is of value not only to musicologists but to general historians as well. Kirkendale's studies have centered on music in Florence but above all on this Roman musician who spent twelve crucial years (1588-1600) in the city of the Medici as superintendent of all artistic activities. He was an aristocrat and a man of many parts: [a] caporione [or Roman administrator], city councillor, conservator of the S.P.Q.R., animator, diplomat, composer, theatrical producer, choreographer, connoisseur of art (agent and collector), literature (who corresponded with Tasso and Guarini; religious literature and Latin liturgical texts), and of organs [even writing music for an enharmonic organ]. (p. 295) He was, in short, "the embodiment of Castigilione's courtier," the ideal personification of a "Roman gentleman," even though he finally became disgusted with court life (p. 295). In his last years he turned, as Carlo Gesualdo was to do, to the musical setting of sacred texts. These works, along with three earlier lost musical pastorales, mark him as one of the great innovators of Western music. Cavalieri's fame rests primarily on his Rappresentatione di anima e di corpo, the first opera to be produced (February 1600) and [End Page 428] published (September 1600), and which over the years has proven to be far more popular with performers than Peri's Euridice (October 1600), long considered to be the first drama sung throughout. At least five complete performances of Cavalieri's morality play have been recorded since 1990, and close to fifty performances were staged during the last century (pp. 463- 464). Even more recordings and performances have taken place since the publication of Kirkendale's book, and, for performers and audiences alike, Cavalieri's Rappresentatione is patently a far more rewarding musical experience than Euridice. Yet, the Rappresentatione is a work that musicologists curiously overlook and pass off as unimportant. The usual criticisms are that it is too tuneful, too full of choruses, too close to the sixteenth century in musical style, too much like the earlier intermedi, and its recitatives are far less expressive than those of the Florentines. It is this seminal composition that provides the ending for Kirkendale's study of Cavalieri. The three initial performances of the opera took place in February of 1600 in a small room off the right transept of Filippo Neri's Chiesa Nuova with a distinguished audience of many cardinals and others in attendance. Kirkendale's exhaustive treatment of this influential work includes a description of these first performances, the publication of the work in late September 1600 (a publication that includes crucial information about its staging and thus an early example of operatic dramaturgy), its powerful dedicatee, Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini (1571-1621), the libretto, which was probably written by the Oratorian priest, Agostino Manni, the...